Conqueror

'Shoot, ye dickheads!' he screamed, as his dog braced its forelegs and sank down on its haunches to stop.

They didn't. Bent over his pommel, gasping and wheezing, M'Telgez looked behind to see why.

The carnosauroid lay prone not five meters behind him, its muzzle plowing a furrow in the dry gritty dirt. One leg was outstretched and the other to the rear, as if it had done the splits in mid-stride. Tail and head beat the ground in an arrhythmic death-tattoo, then slumped into stillness. A neat hole drilled in the yellow scales just behind and above one ear-opening showed why.

'Well, fuck me,' M'Telgez mumbled again. It took three tries to return his rifle to the scabbard, and two to get his canteen open.

'There's one'll na try it, dog-brother,' one of the troopers said admiringly. Two rifles cracked as the corpse of the sauroid went through another bout of twitching, the jaws clashing with an ugly wet metallic sound. Carnosauroids took a good deal of killing.

A jingling and thump of paws sounded in the draw; the battalion standard came up. M'Telgez pulled himself erect with an effort and saluted.

'Colonel, message from C-captain Foley,' he said. 'Ah, we're, ah-'

'Take it easy, lad,' the Colonel said, not unkindly, looking at the dead predator and then at M'Telgez's dog. 'You had a close shave, there, Corporal.'

M'Telgez followed the lifted chin. Pochita's tail was half-missing, ending in a bloody stump; now that the dog wasn't running for its life it was trying to twist around and lick the injury. He dismounted and reached automatically into his saddlebags for ointment and bandages, a cavalry trooper's reflex, and a lifelong vakaro's.

One bite closer. . he thought. The image must have been clear on his face, because the Colonel leaned down and clapped him on the shoulder.

'Good shot,' he said. 'Anything with this?'

'Ah, t'Captain 'uld want some reinforcements, loik,' M'Telgez said. In an effort to clear his mind: 'We'nz goin' t'push through 'em, ser?'

In many line outfits that might have been insolence; Descotters had an easy, unservile way with their squires, though. And he was a long-service man with a good record.

'No, Messer Raj knows a way around,' Colonel Staenbridge said. 'We just have to block them while the main force gets through. I'll come myself. Lead the way, Corporal.'

M'Telgez looked around at the bewildering tangle of blind canyons, sinkholes, and ragged hills. The Spirit must be wit 'im, he decided. Which was a comforting thought.

'Cheer up, lad,' Staenbridge said, as the column formed up and passed the dead predator.

One of the troopers tossed him a fang as long as his hand, with a lump of bloody gum still on the base. M'Telgez dropped it into his haversack; it'd be something to show the girls, cleaned up and worn around his neck on a thong. Might as well get something out of that; that poor fastardo M'tennin wasn't going to, not even a burial. There wouldn't be anything left of him or much of his dog by the time they got there.

'Cheer up. Could have been worse-it could have been wogs.'

M'Telgez looked down at the four-meter length of tiger-striped deadliness lying in the dirt. He nodded. That was true enough. The carnosauroid had only wanted to kill and eat him.

Wogs might have taken him alive.

'Good,' Raj said. 'That was clever of Tewfik, but he had to split his covering force up into too many detachments-there are a lot of badlands out there.'

Staenbridge nodded. 'Only two or three hundred men on the route we actually took,' he said. 'Still, it might have gotten sticky if we couldn't go around-they had an excellent position. How did you know that section of earth was thin enough to cut through behind them?'

An angel told me, and it could tell the thickness of the gully walls by measuring how inaudible sounds passed through, Raj thought sardonically. He wondered what Staenbridge would make of the explanation. Raj didn't understand a word of it himself.

sound waves are-

Forget it. I know it works, I don't have to know how or why.

'Lucky guess, Gerrin.' The tone ruled out any further questions. 'We're about-'

two point six kilometers.

'— two and a half klicks from the bridgehead, now. This is going to be tricky.'

'You expect Tewfik to catch us crossing?' Staenbridge said, raising a brow.

'No, but he's not the only competent commander in the Colonial army, and he'll be in heliograph contact with their main body. What I want you to do is-'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

'Come on lads, put your backs into it,' Colonel Jorg Menyez shouted. 'Messer Raj needs this finished and ready to go by full sunrise!'

Arc lights hissed and kerosene lanterns cast their softer light across the chaos on the riverbank quays of Sandoral. Miniluna and Maxiluna were both on the horizon, paling to translucence as the sun cast bands of yellow and purple up into the fading dusk of night.

At least it's a little cooler, the infantry officer thought. That should speed things up. He'd had the preparations going on all night, what could be done without attracting attention.

There was no more point in trying for silence now, not with two thousand men splashing and clattering as they moved the big boxlike pontoon barges into position. Most of the supports had been beached along Sandoral's long waterfront, just outside the river wall. Teams of men grunted and heaved, some pushing, others prying with beams and planks. One by one the square shapes surged out into the river, then jerked to a halt as the anchor- ropes caught them. Other ropes were payed out and men hauled in groaning unison to pull the barges to the growing eastern end of the bridge. North of it was a line of cable floating between barrels; each marked a line dropping down to an anchor on the riverbed. Naked boatmen swam out with more lines to secure the barges to the cable.

As each was tied off against the current, notched beams went into the cutouts in the bulwarks, and sections of planking were pegged down on top. Men scrambled forward to the next even while the mallets were still pounding on the one they ran on; water slopped over the upstream side as the weight of scores of infantrymen and their burdens of timber and cordage rested on the end barge alone. Down in the hulls others threw buckets of water overside and screamed abuse at the work teams above.

A long hollow boooom sounded from the southward, from where the nearest part of the Colonial siege line had anchored itself with an earthen fort on the riverbank. A long whirring crash followed, and men froze as a heavy roundshot hit the water and skipped like a thrown rock across the surface of the water by a playful boy. Once. . twice. . three times, and the final plume of water was shorter than the others. The Drangosh drank down the big cast-iron ball as easily as it would the boy's pebble. Menyez blew out the breath he had not been aware of holding.

Two kilometers. A little too far. There were ironic cheers from some of the men, and the hammering clatter of work resumed. He looked eastward. The bridge was nearly to the other shore, where a company of infantry was heaving at winches anchored in the dirt, hauling the last few barges. Nice fast piece of work, he thought. It helped that they'd done it before, of course.

Booooom. A little sharper this time, a rifled piece. The sound of the shell was higher as well. It came much closer, only a few hundred meters south, but struck the water only once. A tall fountain of spray reached skyward, high enough that its top was touched red by the light of the sun rising in the west.

'Close, but that only counts with handbombs,' he said.